To prepare hot beverages, machines using single-serve capsules or pods are utilized. The capsule or pod contains a substance which can be dissolved in hot water. These machines are normally used to prepare coffee.
The main problem of utilizing such machine and method to brew tea or raw herbal ingredients is that, tea is not prepared in the same way as coffee powder. Coffee beans are ground into coffee powder having consistent size and density, and the coffee powder is then pre-packaged into a pod or capsule format. However, raw herbal ingredients can come in various formats. Normally, raw plant materials are cut into small pieces of tea leaves measuring from 1 mm to 1 cm. These raw herbal ingredients are not compressed when pre-packaging into a single-serve format. Instead, they remain in a loose format in the capsule and hence create a lower internal pressure than that of coffee powder. Therefore, one of the problems in the extraction of single-serve herbal tea is the existence of inconsistent pressure inside the capsule due to different kinds of tea mixture, as well as their chemical and physical properties.
Another problem is that due to the inconsistent pressure and various properties of the raw plant materials inside the single-serve capsule, the brewing performance is inconsistent and unpredictable. When hot water is pumped into the single-serve capsule placed in a machine, the raw plant materials do not dissolve in hot water. Hence, this does not allow water flow and distribution in a pressurized environment since the raw plant materials are in a loose format. This results in a low-pressure brewing process and the tea prepared is not strong enough. Therefore, it is unable to differentiate the advantage of such brewing method from traditional tea pot brewing method.
A further problem is the large variety of raw tea and herb mixture to be contained in the single-serve capsule.